How Elden Ring's Silliest Memes Get Lost in Translation
Bretwulfo kept stumbling across a message that will be familiar to anyone who’s played Elden Ring: “Try finger, but hole.” At this point, many players would probably roll their eyes at finding yet another use of the game’s messaging system to graffiti crude humour across FromSoft’s incredible fantasy world. The problem was that Bretwulfo is Brazilian, and plays the game in Portuguese – that oft-seen message simply does not translate the same way.
“I was always plunging into holes thinking there was going to be something in it,” Bretwulfo says. “I only got what it was supposed to mean after someone placed it on the ass of a corpse.”
For players who don’t speak English as their first language, Elden Ring’s many meme-messages can be far more of a troll than they were ever intended to be – and English-speaking players may well be getting just as confused by some international equivalents.
“Try finger, but hole”; “Fort, night”; “Dog”; these are just some of the many memes that the English-speaking Elden Ring community have been flooding the game’s messaging system with over the last month. While they might seem like strange phrases in isolation, they’re a product of the game’s communications being restricted by design. You can’t just freely write whatever you want in Elden Ring and stamp it outside some boss fog. Everyone has the same limited number of phrases to choose from, all of which can be cleverly combined to help or hinder fellow Tarnished (it’s usually hinder).
What you may not have known is that the game’s messaging system operates on a global scale – and understandably these player-posted phrases aren’t fully localised for other languages. Instead, they’re translated quite literally – and it’s led to all kinds of
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